Gay male speech

What's sometimes incorrectly described as a gay "lisp"[7] is one manner of speech stereotypically associated with gay speakers of North American English, and perhaps other dialects or languages.[8] It involves a marked pronunciation of sibilant consonants (particularly /s/ and /z/).[9][10] Speech scientist Benjamin Munson and his colleagues have argued that this is not a mis-articulated /s/ (and therefore, not technically a lisp) as much as a hyper-articulated /s/.[11] Specifically, gay men are documented as pronouncing /s/ with higher-frequency spectral peaks, an extremely negatively skewed spectrum, and a longer duration than heterosexual men.[12][13][14] However, not all gay American men speak with this hyper-articulated /s/[15] (perhaps fewer than half),[16] and some carefully speaking men who identify as heterosexual also produce this feature.[15]

Gay men tend to lower the TRAP vowel (except before a nasal consonant) and the DRESS vowel; this was specifically confirmed in a study of North-Central American English speakers.[17] This linguistic phenomenon is normally associated with the California vowel shift and also reported in a study of a gay speaker of California English itself, who strengthened these same features and also fronted the GOOSE and GOAT vowels when speaking with friends more than in other speaking situations. Results suggest that a California regional sound can be employed by gay men for stylistic effect, including to evoke a "fun" or "partier" persona.[18]

Some other speech features are also stereotyped as markers of gay or bisexual males: carefully enunciated pronunciation, wide pitch range (high and rapidly changing pitch), breathy voice, lengthened fricative sounds, and pronunciation of /t/ as /ts/ and /d/ as /dz/ (affrication), etc.[9] Research shows that gay speech characteristics include many of the same characteristics other speakers use when attempting to speak with special carefulness or clarity, including over-articulating and expanding the vowel spaces in the mouth.[19]

In terms of perception, the "gay sound" in North American English is popularly presumed to involve the pronunciation of sibilants (/s/, /z/, /ʃ/) with noticeable assibilation, sibilation, hissing, or stridency.[9] Frontal, dentalized and negatively skewed articulations of /s/ (the aforementioned "gay lisp") are indeed found to be the most powerful perceptual indicators to a listener of a male speaker's sexual orientation,[20] with experiments revealing that such articulations are perceived as "gayer-sounding" and "younger-sounding".[21]

Gay speech is also widely stereotyped as resembling women's speech.[22] However, on the basis of phonetics, Benjamin Munson and his colleagues' research has discovered that gay male speech does not simply or categorically imitate female speech.[23]

In one Canadian study, listeners correctly identified gay speakers in 62% of cases.[16] A Stanford University experiment analyzed the acoustics of eight males (four straight and four gay), who were recorded reading passages, through the perception of listener-subjects and tasked these listeners with categorizing speakers by adjectives corresponding to common U.S. stereotypes of gay men.[22] The listeners were generally able to correctly identify the sexual orientation of the speakers, reflecting the stereotypes. However, there were no statistically significant differences the listeners identified, if they existed at all, based on intonation.[22] These findings are representative of other studies as well.[24]

Another study[6] examined the duration of certain sounds (/æ/, /eɪ/, and the onset of /s/ and /l/), frequency of stressed vowels, voice-onset time of voiceless aspirated consonants, and the release of word-final stop consonants. The study found some correlation between these speech traits and sexual orientation, but also clarified the study's narrow scope on only certain phonetic features.[6]

Language and gender scholar Robin Lakoff not only compares gay male with female speech but also claims that gay men deliberately imitate the latter,[25] claiming this to include an increased use of superlatives, inflected intonation, and lisping.[26] Later linguists have re-evaluated Lakoff's claims and concluded that these characterizations are not consistent for women, instead reflecting stereotypes that may have social meaning and importance but that do not fully capture actual gendered language use.[27]

Linguist David Crystal correlated the use among men of an "effeminate" or "simpering" voice with a widened range of pitch, glissando effects between stressed syllables, greater use of fall-rise and rise-fall tones, vocal breathiness and huskiness, and occasionally more switching to the falsetto register.[28] Still, research has not confirmed any unique intonation or pitch qualities of gay speech.[22] Some such characteristics have been portrayed as mimicking women's speech and judged as derogatory toward or trivializing of women.[29]